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Meditation Increases Compassionate Response to Suffering

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Psychological Science
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DOI: 10.1177/0956797613485603
2013 24: 2125 originally published online 21 August 2013Psychological Science
Paul Condon, Gaëlle Desbordes, Willa B. Miller and David DeSteno
Meditation Increases Compassionate Responses to Suffering
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Short Report
Contemplative science has documented a plethora of
intrapersonal benefits stemming from meditation, includ-
ing increases in gray matter density (Hölzel, Carmody,
et al., 2011), positive affect (Moyer et al., 2011), and
improvement in various mental-health outcomes (Hölzel,
Lazar, et al., 2011). Strikingly, however, much less is
known about the interpersonal impact of meditation.
Although Buddhist teachings suggest that increases in
compassionate responding should be a primary outcome
of meditation (Davidson & Harrington, 2002), little scien-
tific evidence supports this conjecture. Even as scientists
have begun to examine the effects of meditation on pro-
social action, the conclusions that can be drawn with
respect to compassion have been limited by designs that
lack real-time person-to-person interactions centered on
suffering. Previous work, for example, has utilized medi-
tators’ self-reported intentions and motivations to behave
in supportive manners toward other individuals (e.g.,
Fredrickson, Cohn, Coffey, Pek, & Finkel, 2008) and com-
puter-based economic games requiring cooperation (e.g.,
Leiberg, Klimecki, & Singer, 2011; Weng et al., 2013) to
assess altruistic action. Such methods have suggested that
meditation may increase generalized prosocial respond-
ing, but have not clearly and objectively gauged responses
meant solely to mitigate the suffering of other individuals.
To address this gap, we utilized a design in which
individuals were confronted with a person in pain in an
ecologically valid setting. If, as suggested by Buddhist
theorizing, meditation enhances compassionate respond-
ing, participants who have completed a brief meditation
course should act to relieve such a person’s suffering
more frequently than those who have not completed the
course.
Method
The final set of participants comprised 39 individuals (29
female, 10 male; mean age = 25.23 years, SD = 4.66)
recruited from the Greater Boston community for an
8-week study on meditation. (See the Supplemental
Material available online for recruitment procedures.)
Individuals were randomly assigned either to complete
meditation classes or to be in a waiting-list control group.
Those assigned to the meditation condition were further
randomly subdivided to receive one of two protocols:
mindfulness or compassion meditation. We utilized two
separate meditation protocols both to enhance generaliz-
ability and to ensure that any resulting effects of medita-
tion on behavior could not be attributed to demand
characteristics. Although techniques to focus and calm
the mind were taught in both protocols, direct discussion
of compassion and the suffering of other people occurred
only in compassion meditation. (See the Supplemental
Material for meditation protocols.)
Meditation classes were held in a nondenominational
venue dedicated to spiritual activities (e.g., prayer, medi-
tation, yoga). A Tibetan Buddhist lama (author W. M.)
with 20-plus years of meditation experience conducted
both courses. The classes were taught in a secular format
featuring 60 min of instruction, 30 min of practice, and
30 min for discussion; classes were held once a week for
8 weeks. Participants also received 20-min audio-guided
meditations to complete independently outside of class.
Participants reported their daily use of the audio record-
ings each week. Participants received $60 for their
participation.
1
Following 8 weeks of meditation practice or approxi-
mately 8 weeks after initial recruitment to the waiting list,
485603PSS
XXX10.1177/0956797613485603Condon et al.Meditation and Compassionate Behavior
research-article2013
Corresponding Authors:
Paul Condon, Department of Psychology, 360 Huntington Ave.,
Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115
E-mail: p.condon@neu.edu
David DeSteno, Department of Psychology, 360 Huntington Ave.,
Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115
E-mail: d.desteno@gmail.com
Meditation Increases Compassionate
Responses to Suffering
Paul Condon
1
, Gaëlle Desbordes
2
, Willa B. Miller
3
,
and David DeSteno
1
1
Department of Psychology, Northeastern University;
2
Athinoula A. Martinos Center for
Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School;
and
3
Department of Religion, Harvard University
Received 1/3/13; Revision accepted 3/17/13
2126 Condon et al.
participants were scheduled to come to the lab under the
guise of completing tests of cognitive ability. To obtain a
naturalistic measure of responses to suffering, we utilized
confederates to construct a test situation outside the labo-
ratory. All confederates were blind both to the hypothesis
being tested and to each participant’s experimental condi-
tion. Prior to a participants arrival, two female confeder-
ates sat in a designated waiting area possessing three
chairs. Upon arriving at the waiting area, the participant
sat in the remaining chair. After the participant had been
sitting for 1 min, a third female confederate, who played
the role of the “sufferer, appeared around the corner with
crutches and a walking boot. The sufferer, who visibly
winced while walking, stopped just as she arrived at the
chairs. She then looked at her cell phone, audibly sighed
in discomfort, and leaned back against a wall.
To assess compassionate responding, we measured
whether the true participant offered his or her seat to the
sufferer to relieve her pain. Via text message, one of the
sitting confederates surreptitiously notified the experi-
menter, who was waiting out of sight, whether and when
the participant offered the seat to the sufferer. If 2 min
passed and the participant had not given up his or her
seat, the trial was ended and coded as a nonhelping
response. The experimenter then entered the waiting
area, greeted the participant, and escorted him or her to
the lab to complete a series of measures unrelated to the
goals of the present analysis.
Results and Discussion
As predicted, meditation directly enhanced compassion-
ate responding. Meditators offered their seats to the suf-
ferer more frequently than did nonmeditators from
the waiting-list control group, !
2
(1, N = 39) = 5.13, p =
.02, " = .36 (see Table 1). This enhanced prosocial
responding did not differ as a function of meditation pro-
tocol; participants practicing mindfulness meditation
were as likely to aid the sufferer as were those practicing
compassion meditation (see the Supplemental Material
for analysis).
2
That 8 weeks of meditation resulted in
such a large effect—increasing the odds of acting to
relieve another person’s pain by more than 5 times (odds
ratio = 5.33)—is all the more striking given that the help-
ing occurred in a social context whose features should
attenuate such behavior. The simple presence of the two
confederates and their total disregard for the pain of the
sufferer constitutes a classic bystander manipulation in
which both diffusion of responsibility and norms sug-
gesting an acceptance of nonintervention are heightened
(cf. Darley & Latané, 1968).
Additional work will be needed to isolate the specific
causal mechanism for the observed effect more narrowly,
as several meditation-induced mediators (e.g., height-
ened awareness, increased perspective taking) stand as
possible candidates (cf. Hölzel, Lazar, et al., 2011).
Nonetheless, this study is the first to clearly show the
power of meditation to increase compassionate respond-
ing to suffering, even in the face of social pressures to
avoid so doing. In turn, it provides scientific credence to
ancient Buddhist teachings that meditation increases
spontaneous compassionate behavior.
Author Contributions
P. Condon, D. DeSteno, G. Desbordes, and W. B. Miller
designed the experiments. P. Condon and W. B. Miller con-
ducted the research. P. Condon and D. DeSteno conducted the
analyses and wrote the manuscript.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with
respect to their authorship or the publication of this article.
Funding
We acknowledge support from a Mind and Life Institute
Francisco J. Varela award. Any views, findings, conclusions, or
recommendations expressed in this publication do not neces-
sarily reflect those of the Mind and Life Institute.
Supplemental Material
Additional supporting information may be found at http://pss
.sagepub.com/content/by/supplemental-data
Notes
1. Participants in the meditation condition earned an additional
$20 and entry into a $100 raffle for completing weekly logs.
2. Additional analyses revealed that gender did not affect rates
of helping behavior. Also of import, analyses of self-reported
social networks demonstrated that social-network size neither
increased as a result of participation in the meditation classes
nor significantly differed between the meditation and control
groups, suggesting that increases in social capital from par-
ticipating in a group activity could not account for the central
finding that meditation increased compassionate respond-
ing (see the Supplemental Material for these and additional
results).
Table 1.# Observed and Expected Frequencies of Helping
Behavior Across Conditions
Meditation training Waiting-list control
Outcome Observed Expected Observed Expected
No help 10 13.3 16 12.7
Help 10 6.7 3 6.3
Meditation and Compassionate Behavior 2127
References
Darley, J. M., & Latané, B. (1968). Bystander intervention
in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 8, 377–383.
Davidson, R. J., & Harrington, A. (2002). Visions of compassion:
Western scientists and Tibetan Buddhists examine human
nature. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Fredrickson, B. L., Cohn, M. A., Coffey, K. A., Pek, J., & Finkel,
S. M. (2008). Open hearts build lives: Positive emotions,
induced through loving-kindness meditation, build con-
sequential personal resources. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 95, 1045–1062.
Hölzel, B. K., Carmody, J., Vangel, M., Congleton, C., Yerramsetti,
S. M., Gard, T., & Lazar, S. W. (2011). Mindfulness practice
leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density.
Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 191, 36–43.
Hölzel, B. K., Lazar, S. W., Gard, T., Schuman-Olivier, Z.,
Vago, D. R., & Ott, U. (2011). How does mindfulness
meditation work? Proposing mechanisms of action from a
conceptual and neural perspective. Perspectives on Psycho-
logical Science, 6, 537–559.
Leiberg, S., Klimecki, O., & Singer, T. (2011). Short-
term compassion training increases prosocial behav-
ior in a newly developed prosocial game. PLoS ONE, 6,
e17798. Retrieved from http://www.plosone.org/article/
info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0017798
Moyer, C. A., Donnelly, M. P. W., Anderson, J. C., Valek, K.
C., Huckaby, S. J., Widerholt, D. A., . . . Rice, B. L. (2011).
Frontal electroencephalographic asymmetry associated
with positive emotion is produced by very brief meditation
training. Psychological Science, 22, 1277–1279.
Weng, H. Y., Fox, A. S., Shackman, A. J., Stodola, D. E.,
Caldwell, J. Z. K., Olson, M. C., . . . Davidson, R. J.
(2013). Compassion training alters altruism and neural
responses to suffering. Psychological Science, 24, 1171–
1180.
!!!!!Meditation and Compassionate Behavior
10
Supplementary Online Material (word count: 977)
Participants
During recruitment, all participants self-
reported little to no experience with any type of
meditation experience and none reported completing
any previous meditation course or meditation retreat.
All participants passed a telephone-administered
version of the Mini-Mental State Examination as
indicated by a score greater than or equal to 21
(Newkirk et al., 2004).
Sixty-seven individuals were initially
recruited for the study. Twenty-six dropped out prior
to completion of the training portion. Two others
were removed by experimenters: one who did not
take a chair in the waiting area upon arrival and one
who expressed suspicion about the study. The final
sample consisted of 39 individuals (20 meditators,
and 19 waitlist controls).
Supplementary Analyses
Amount of Training
On average, meditating participants attended
6.60 (SD=0.50) instruction sessions and reported
completing independent 20-minute intervals of
meditation 3.74 (SD=1.04) times per week.
Helping Behavior by Meditation Class
Those participants who completed the
mindfulness- and compassion-based meditation did
not differ in frequency of helping behavior,
!
2
(1)=0.20, p>.65 (see Table S1).
Gender
Gender differences in helping behavior have
been reported in numerous studies, although the
direction of these differences vary depending on
context. Males help more frequently in some contexts
(e.g., short-term encounters), but females help more
in others (e.g., long-term close relationships; for a
review, see Eagly & Crowley, 1986). In the current
study, we found that participant gender did not affect
frequency of compassionate responding, f
females
=10
out of 29, f
males
=3 out of 10, !
2
(1,N=39)=0.07, p>.79.
Furthermore, the composition of male and female
participants in the meditation and control groups did
not differ, !
2
(1)=0.41.
Design Limitations: Control Group and Social
Network Analysis
The nature of our design required that one
group (i.e., meditators) came together for repeated
classes, thereby creating a context that afforded
interaction with other individuals participating in the
study. The waitlist group had no such possibility of
interacting with others due to participation in a
structured class. Thus, although the control group
was matched with respect to interest in meditation
and desire to enroll in an 8-week course, its members
did not engage in repeated interactions with
meditation class members or an instructor. One
resulting concern is that repeated interactions with
fellow participants in the course may have produced
social consequences that could account for increased
levels of helping behavior (e.g., increased social
resources). To rule out this possibility, we obtained a
measure of the number of people that participants
interacted with on a regular basis before and after
training. At pre- and post-testing (i.e., eight weeks
apart), participants received an email with a link to an
online version of the Social Network Index (Cohen,
Doyle, Skoner, Rabin, & Gwaltney, 1997). This
survey asked participants to list the initials of every
individual that they “interacted with in person or over
the phone at least once every two weeks.” The survey
prompted participants to list people in the following
categories: romantic partner, parents, partner’s
parents, children, relatives, friends, classmates, co-
workers, acquaintances, members of a spiritual
group, members of a volunteer group, and members
of unspecified groups. Participants could list up to
seven individuals for each category, with the
exception of friends and members of unspecified
group (up to ten individuals). Our primary interest
concerned the total number of people with whom
participants reported interacting. If the meditation
classes increased social capital, we would expect to
find that those in the meditation group reported an
increase in their number of relationships at post-
testing, relative to the wait-list group.
A 2 (time: pre, post) X 2 (group: meditators,
wait-list) repeated measures ANOVA, with time as
the repeated factor, revealed no main effect of group
on social capital (M
meditators
=11.58; SD
meditators
=4.53;
M
wait-list
=12.35 SD
wait-list
=5.07), F(1,31)=0.21, p>.65,
and no effect of time (M
pre-test
=12.18; SD
pre-test
=5.60;
M
post-test
=11.58 SD
post-test
=5.10), F(1,31)=0.83, p>.37.
There was no interaction, F(1,31)=1.40, p>.24 (note
that only 13 participants from the WL control group
provided responses to the SNI). In sum, participants
!!!!!Meditation and Compassionate Behavior
11
in the meditation group did not experience a growth
in their social network as a function of participating
in an organized class. Thus, the experience of
participating in a group activity is unlikely to account
for our central finding, at least as stemming from
increases in social capital.
It could also be argued, however, that
exposure to a caring or charismatic instructor might
have exerted an influence, principally through
modeling. That is, meditation in and of itself
covaried with exposure to an instructor in our design.
Although certainly possible, we believe that such a
factor is unlikely to account for our findings in the
present case. If it were the influence of exposure to a
caring instructor, we would expect to find a greater
effect of meditation on prosocial behavior among
participants following the compassion meditation
protocol, where actual discussion of the virtue of
relieving the suffering of others was discussed by the
instructor. In the mindfulness meditation condition,
no such discussions occurred; all instruction centered
on techniques involved in centering attention (e.g.,
breathing), and consequently provided no opportunity
for prosocial behavior to be modeled on or directly
influenced by the instructor’s explicit or implicit
goals. Nonetheless, having established the basic
phenomenon, we believe it fruitful for future
investigation to aim toward disambiguating the exact
mechanisms associated with contemplative training
that may underlie its enhancement of prosocial
behavior, as well as individual susceptibility to such
enhancement.
References for Supplementary Material
Cohen, S., Doyle, W.J., Skoner, D.P., Rabin, B.S., Gwaltney, J.M. (1997). Social ties and
susceptibility to the common cold. Journal of the American Medical Association, 277,
1940-1944.
Eagly, A.H., & Crowley, M. (1986). Gender and helping behavior: A meta-analytic review of the
social psychological literature. Psychological Bulletin, 100, 283-308.
Newkirk, L.A., Kim, J.M., Thompson, J.M., Tinklenberg, J.R., Yesavage, J.A., & Taylor, J.L.
(2004). Validation of a 26-point telephone version of the Mini-Mental State Examination.
Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry and Neurology, 17, 81-87.
Acknowledgement
We thank Kevin Bickart for assistance with the social network analysis.
!!!!!Meditation and Compassionate Behavior
12
Supplementary Table 1.
Observed and expected frequencies of helping behavior by meditation group.
Mindfulness-group
Compassion-group
Observed
Expected
Observed
Expected
5
4.5
5
5.5
4
4.5
6
5.5
Note. !
2
(1)=0.20, p>.65! !
!!!!!Meditation and Compassionate Behavior
13
Supplementary Table 2A.
Mindfulness-based training protocol.
Week
Training components
1
Open awareness meditation
Introduction of basic techniques (e.g., body-scan) for relaxing the body and monitoring the mind’s natural tendency to
wander from the object of attention (i.e., the body).
2
Mindfulness of a physical object
Introduction and elaboration of practices for learning to calm the conceptually discursive mind for the purpose of attenuating
involuntary thoughts. Stability of attention (i.e., on a physical object) is practiced with the goal of sustaining attention in a
purposeful, non-judgmental manner for an extended period.
3
Mindfulness of the breathing with relaxation (I)
Continuing practice of techniques designed to instill a deepening sense of physical and mental relaxation, stillness, and
vigilance. When successful, involuntary thoughts subside and vividness of attention gradually increases. This gives rise to an
overall sense of greater presence, calm, and equilibrium.
4
Mindfulness of the breathing with relaxation (II)
Continuing practice from Week 3. Additional instruction focused on common impediments to meditation practice, including
sleepiness, agitation, and boredom.
5
Settling the mind in its natural state (i. e., mindfulness of mental events) (I)
Introduction of practices for further refining the meditator’s metacognitive abilities, with the goal of attenuating the
immediate and habitual absorption in one’s thoughts that characterize most mental functioning. When successful, insight
into the nature of the mind and its activities is achieved.
6
Settling the mind in its natural state (II)
Continued practice with the goal of developing increased relaxation, stillness of awareness in the midst of mental activities,
and vividness, together with heightened metacognitive abilities to observe mental states and processes without identifying
with them.
7
Awareness of awareness (I)
In this final technique, relaxation, stillness, and vividness of attention continue to be enhanced, leading to a perception of the
process of becoming aware, as opposed to only perceiving the contents of awareness.
8
Mindfulness of awareness and thoughts
Participants use the techniques they’ve learned from all previous weeks and apply them to concentration on the quality of
immediate mental experience. Instead of using breath or body as an object, now mind itself becomes the meditation object.
Particular attention will be paid to working with the arising and disappearing of thoughts.
!!!!!Meditation and Compassionate Behavior
14
Supplementary Table 2B.
Compassion-based training protocol.
Week
Training components
1
Developing attention and stability of mind
Introduction of basic meditation techniques for focusing attention for increasingly longer periods of time. These techniques
are included in the practice of all subsequent compassion meditation components.
2
Baring witness to ones current life-stressors and difficulties
Introduction of practice for noticing and reflecting on current life challenges, such as a difficult situation, event, or person.
Participants learn to accept themselves in these moments and relax resistance to discomfort to remain and experience these
states without judgment or a need to remedy it. When successful, this practice leads to the dissolution of discomfort.
3
Commune with other’s life-stressors and difficulties
Introduction of techniques to develop awareness of the commonality of one’s own suffering. Participants learn to recognize
that all others feel discomfort just as they do. Participants imagine themselves in a community of others experiencing the
same discomfort.
4
Extending compassion outward
Building on previous practice of bearing witness and communing with suffering, participants visualize breathing own and
others suffering into the heart (inhalation) and dissolving all difficulties outward into a spacious sky (exhalation).
5
Release of suffering
Introduction of practice for letting go of one’s own and others’ suffering into a state of open awareness.
6
Exchange with others – close target
The culmination of previous instruction are specifically applied to a close other (i.e,. a person that one cares about).
Participants visualize the disappearance of another’s suffering as they breath it inward and send compassion outward.
7
Exchange with others – neutral, unknown target and a difficult, annoying target
Extending practice of exchange with others to neutral and difficult targets.
8
Exchange with others – all sentient beings
Extending practice of exchange with others to all sentient beings.
... Moreover, mindfulness has been associated with heightened compassion, extending both to oneself (self-compassion) and others (229). The heightened compassion toward others fosters a profound sense of interconnectedness and facilitates responding to potential conflicts with non-aggressive approaches (230). When individuals develop self-compassion, they are better equipped to manage selfcriticism and self-blame, which are often intertwined with social difficulties in depression (231). ...
... Additionally, mindfulness training fosters compassion, and facilitates forgiveness toward others (230,242). When individuals are more compassionate, they tend to be more patient and forgiving, which can lead to more harmonious and fulfilling relationships. ...
... Finally, mindfulness training has been shown to increase willingness to cooperate in the ultimatum game (243). Further, two studies have shown that an 8-week mindfulness training program has promoted reactive prosocial behavior while observing suffering or hardship of a confederate (230,244). Further, mindfulness promoted prosocial responsiveness to a representation of an ostracized stranger (245) (see Figure 1). Another study found that subjects in the mindfulness condition allocated more money to another participant despite not having any information about the financial needs or any other form of distress (246). ...
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... In an experimental study Condon et al. (2013) found that the group who meditated for eight weeks, was much more altruistic to the sufferer than the control group and Lim et al. (2015) concluded that this effect was not due to an increased ability to resolve emotional experiences of others. Foster (2016) 6 could be two reasons for their finding: First, "since meditation enhances attention, meditators might more readily notice someone in pain." ...
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... In a mindfulness state, the person will tend to be prosocial whether he acts deontologically or utilitarianly, benefiting the other for morality, or for being the most useful for the common good. The person whose attention is neither judgmental nor reactive is not on the defensive, and wants to reduce their own suffering as much as they want other people to suffer less (Berry et al., 2023;Condon et al., 2013). The quieting fostered by meditative practices reduces cognitive automatisms and may favor prosocial attitudes (Berry et al., 2023;Condon, 2019;Luberto et al., 2018;Nicol & De France, 2024;Pinazo & Breso, 2017). ...
... Even short sessions of full attention have reduced the negative effects of the threat to the selfconcept in a context in which the ego is negatively stereotyped (Weger et al., 2012). Being compassionate or acting prosocially, two attitudes associated with meditative practices (Berry et al., 2023;Condon et al., 2013) are types of self-enhancement of the self-concept. Being compassionate to others and helping them implies being in a self-salient state that, based on the most important values in this regard (compassion, help), wishes the other well. ...
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The self-centrality principle holds that contemplative practices activate self-salience, encouraging moral self-enhancement, rather than the expected effect of acceptance hypothesized by the ego-quieting principle (Gebauer et al., 2018). However, meditation may favor ego-quieting by inhibiting the disposition to judge and/or react to defend more equanimously a self that feels threatened (Brown et al., 2007). In this study, we propose that meditation helps to reduce behaviors based on self-interest by limiting the defensive sense of the ego when the self is salient. We carry out three experimental studies to test this proposal. The first one tests the effect of meditation on a salient self with a proximal threat to their physical survival (N = 400). The second study tests the effect of meditation in the case of distal defensiveness in a salient self whose physical survival is threatened (N = 200). The third study evaluates the effect of proximal defensiveness when the integrity of the self-concept of the salient self is threatened (N = 200). Our results provide evidence that practicing meditation quiets the ego, or tends to do so, when attention is focused on a self-threatened by a context based on a thought.
... M.'s perspective broadened to avoid creating Free Energy for many unknown persons. This individual transformation aligns with research on the impact of mindfulness on ethical decision-making and prosocial behavior (Ruedy and Schweitzer 2010;Condon et al. 2013). ...
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Based on a condensed historical overview of management as an artifact, the article argues that management is still suffused by an implicit paradigm of value extraction that is ideologically and culturally tinted and that we need to find a new foothold in theory and practice, a more universally valid approach with an encompassing awareness of societal well-being and long-term impact. The radically new approach proposed is based on free energy minimization, a concept from computational neuroscience, as a universally valid principle derived from the biological imperative to survive that holds true for individuals and social systems alike. In order to reduce harmful free energy from entropy and stochastic adversity, an amplified way of perceiving and being aware of reality is required that needs to be cultivated. This is achieved through the guiding principle of Minding, an ongoing process of inner and outer awareness and caring consideration of oneself, others and the world around us, routed in a comprehensive consciousness including awareness of Body sensations, Emotions, Thoughts and Action impulses (BETA). This comprehensive, strategic awareness is proposed as a unifying, contextual framework for individual and collective well-being rather than a categorical imperative, and therefore may, when and where indispensable, include value extraction and value maximization if required for the overall objective of shared, long-term flourishing. The article also presents examples of implementation of the proposed approach for both individuals and organizations and briefly introduces MBSAT-Mindfulness-based Strategic Awareness Training, a training protocol designed specifically to enhance the competence of Minding, the guiding principle.
... Several studies and meta-analyses have revealed positive and significant benefits of mindfulness on various types of prosociality, including behaviors such as monetary donations, the altruistic sharing of gains after gameplay, volunteering, donating time, writing letters, or offering one's seat to someone else (Berry et al., 2020;Condon et al., 2013;Donald et al., 2019;Feruglio et al., 2022;Kreplin et al., 2018;Luberto et al., 2018;Malin, 2023;Schindler & Friese, 2022). ...
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We evaluated the efficacy of a brief mindfulness intervention on monetary and in-kind donation decisions. The participants (N = 659) watched either a five-minute meditation video or a neutral video before choosing to donate a portion of their bonus to a charity. They also chose whether to donate an in-kind item to the same charity. We randomly assigned participants to seven need-based scenarios that specified how much (high or low) had already been donated out of how much was needed. The mindfulness meditation video significantly increased monetary donations, a finding that replicates a key result by Iwamoto et al. (2020). The mindfulness video also significantly increased in-kind donation intensity. Two need-based scenarios also significantly influenced in-kind donations. This study adds to the growing body of work that investigates the impact of brief mindfulness induction on prosocial behavior. Our findings suggest that brief mindfulness can elicit altruistic actions with respect to both monetary and in-kind donations.
... As mentioned above, in addition to the focus on external phenomena and collective social structures, researchers of landsenses ecology also focus on the role of the inner world or inner abilities such as emotions, ideas, values, worldviews, identities and beliefs in sustainable transformation, and consider it as a dimension of sustainability itself. Some scholars (e.g., [4,11]) interpret conscious, compassionate, non-critical attention to the present moment as mindfulness, and argue that mindfulness is associated with ecologically responsible behavior toward the common good [8], and it should become a core concept in the practice and teaching of sustainability science [71]. Other scholars believe that discourse has material effects and power effects [17,27], helps to create and reinforce vocabulary, ideas, and beliefs shared by members [18], thus shaping identity, beliefs, and even mindfulness. ...
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At present, the research of sustainable development is developing from a single local problem to a multi-scale, transdisciplinary and comprehensive study. The evaluation and monitoring of its progress need to adopt multi-disciplinary research methods and multi-dimensional, multi-scale identification mechanism. Landsenses ecology is an emerging scientific system that uses the basic principles of ecology to study the sustainable development of land-use planning, construction, and management from the aspects of natural elements, physical senses, psychological perceptions, social economy, process and risk. It provides an effective way for the multi-disciplinary integration research of the relationship between human and ecosystem, and provides an important method and theory for the sustainable transformation research of environmental system and social–economic system, and plays an important role in guiding and realizing the beneficial impact of human on natural ecosystem. This study describes 57 articles published in peer-reviewed journals between 2016 and 2024, using qualitative content analysis, and discusses the impact of landsenses ecology on the way sustainable development is perceived and practiced. The results suggest that the role of landsenses ecology in the creation of sustainable vision resonance and behavior is crucial to the study of sustainable transformation and will help to explore effective strategies for using intrinsic sustainable transformation as a deep leverage point.
... Table 7-H in the Supplementary Tables document. 22 In line with the observed influences of our intervention on SVO_score and Decision_time, we conducted a rigorous supplementary evaluation to ascertain the non-existence of selection bias within our study, thereby ensuring that the observed effects were attributable directly to the intervention. To this end, we employed the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) test, utilizing the Augmented Inverse Probability Weighting (AIPW) method. ...
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Compassion is a key motivator of altruistic behavior, but little is known about individuals' capacity to cultivate compassion through training. We examined whether compassion may be systematically trained by testing whether (a) short-term compassion training increases altruistic behavior and (b) individual differences in altruism are associated with training-induced changes in neural responses to suffering. In healthy adults, we found that compassion training increased altruistic redistribution of funds to a victim encountered outside of the training context. Furthermore, increased altruistic behavior after compassion training was associated with altered activation in brain regions implicated in social cognition and emotion regulation, including the inferior parietal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and in DLPFC connectivity with the nucleus accumbens. These results suggest that compassion can be cultivated with training and that greater altruistic behavior may emerge from increased engagement of neural systems implicated in understanding the suffering of other people, executive and emotional control, and reward processing.
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Cultivation of mindfulness, the nonjudgmental awareness of experiences in the present moment, produces beneficial effects on well-being and ameliorates psychiatric and stress-related symptoms. Mindfulness meditation has therefore increasingly been incorporated into psychotherapeutic interventions. Although the number of publications in the field has sharply increased over the last two decades, there is a paucity of theoretical reviews that integrate the existing literature into a comprehensive theoretical framework. In this article, we explore several components through which mindfulness meditation exerts its effects: (a) attention regulation, (b) body awareness, (c) emotion regulation (including reappraisal and exposure, extinction, and reconsolidation), and (d) change in perspective on the self. Recent empirical research, including practitioners' self-reports and experimental data, provides evidence supporting these mechanisms. Functional and structural neuroimaging studies have begun to explore the neuroscientific processes underlying these components. Evidence suggests that mindfulness practice is associated with neuroplastic changes in the anterior cingulate cortex, insula, temporo-parietal junction, fronto-limbic network, and default mode network structures. The authors suggest that the mechanisms described here work synergistically, establishing a process of enhanced self-regulation. Differentiating between these components seems useful to guide future basic research and to specifically target areas of development in the treatment of psychological disorders. © Association for Psychological Science 2011.
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Compassion has been suggested to be a strong motivator for prosocial behavior. While research has demonstrated that compassion training has positive effects on mood and health, we do not know whether it also leads to increases in prosocial behavior. We addressed this question in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we introduce a new prosocial game, the Zurich Prosocial Game (ZPG), which allows for repeated, ecologically valid assessment of prosocial behavior and is sensitive to the influence of reciprocity, helping cost, and distress cues on helping behavior. Experiment 2 shows that helping behavior in the ZPG increased in participants who had received short-term compassion training, but not in participants who had received short-term memory training. Interindividual differences in practice duration were specifically related to changes in the amount of helping under no-reciprocity conditions. Our results provide first evidence for the positive impact of short-term compassion training on prosocial behavior towards strangers in a training-unrelated task.
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Therapeutic interventions that incorporate training in mindfulness meditation have become increasingly popular, but to date little is known about neural mechanisms associated with these interventions. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), one of the most widely used mindfulness training programs, has been reported to produce positive effects on psychological well-being and to ameliorate symptoms of a number of disorders. Here, we report a controlled longitudinal study to investigate pre-post changes in brain gray matter concentration attributable to participation in an MBSR program. Anatomical magnetic resonance (MR) images from 16 healthy, meditation-naïve participants were obtained before and after they underwent the 8-week program. Changes in gray matter concentration were investigated using voxel-based morphometry, and compared with a waiting list control group of 17 individuals. Analyses in a priori regions of interest confirmed increases in gray matter concentration within the left hippocampus. Whole brain analyses identified increases in the posterior cingulate cortex, the temporo-parietal junction, and the cerebellum in the MBSR group compared with the controls. The results suggest that participation in MBSR is associated with changes in gray matter concentration in brain regions involved in learning and memory processes, emotion regulation, self-referential processing, and perspective taking.
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B. L. Fredrickson's (1998, 2001) broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions asserts that people's daily experiences of positive emotions compound over time to build a variety of consequential personal resources. The authors tested this build hypothesis in a field experiment with working adults (n = 139), half of whom were randomly-assigned to begin a practice of loving-kindness meditation. Results showed that this meditation practice produced increases over time in daily experiences of positive emotions, which, in turn, produced increases in a wide range of personal resources (e.g., increased mindfulness, purpose in life, social support, decreased illness symptoms). In turn, these increments in personal resources predicted increased life satisfaction and reduced depressive symptoms. Discussion centers on how positive emotions are the mechanism of change for the type of mind-training practice studied here and how loving-kindness meditation is an intervention strategy that produces positive emotions in a way that outpaces the hedonic treadmill effect.
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This book examines how Western behavioral science - which has generally focused on negative aspects of human nature - holds up to cross-cultural scrutiny, in particular the Tibetan Buddhist celebration of the human potential for altruism, empathy, and compassion. Resulting from a meeting between the Dalai Lama, leading Western scholars, and a group of Tibetan monks, this volume includes excerpts from these dialogues as well as engaging chapters exploring points of difference and overlap between the two perspectives.
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Objective: To examine the hypothesis that diverse ties to friends, family, work, and community are associated with increased host resistance to infection. Design: After reporting the extent of participation in 12 types of social ties (eg, spouse, parent, friend, workmate, member of social group), subjects were given nasal drops containing 1 of 2 rhinoviruses and monitored for the development of a common cold. Setting: Quarantine. Participants: A total of 276 healthy volunteers, aged 18 to 55 years, neither seropositive for human immunodeficiency virus nor pregnant. Outcome measures: Colds (illness in the presence of a verified infection), mucus production, mucociliary clearance function, and amount of viral replication. Results: In response to both viruses, those with more types of social ties were less susceptible to common colds, produced less mucus, were more effective in ciliary clearance of their nasal passages, and shed less virus. These relationships were unaltered by statistical controls for prechallenge virus-specific antibody, virus type, age, sex, season, body mass index, education, and race. Susceptibility to colds decreased in a dose-response manner with increased diversity of the social network. There was an adjusted relative risk of 4.2 comparing persons with fewest (1 to 3) to those with most (6 or more) types of social ties. Although smoking, poor sleep quality, alcohol abstinence, low dietary intake of vitamin C, elevated catecholamine levels, and being introverted were all associated with greater susceptibility to colds, they could only partially account for the relation between social network diversity and incidence of colds. Conclusions: More diverse social networks were associated with greater resistance to upper respiratory illness.